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On Riyadh’s Diplomatic Quarter

When I used to live in Riyadh, the Diplomatic Quarter was one of my favorite areas in the city. Clean, organized and quiet, it felt like a secret oasis within the city. In a way, it was. Since the early 2000’s, access to the neighborhood has been highly restricted due to fear of terrorist attacks targeting the diplomatic missions located there.

Now in addition to being the semi-official newspaper for the country and the capital’s city namesake, al-Riyadh daily also serves as a newsletter for the Saudi royal family. When a prince gets married, al-Riyadh would typically run pages upon pages full of pictures from the all-male wedding. Such weddings usually take place in a banquet hall called Palace of Culture in the Diplomatic Quarter.

The newspaper recently ran photos from yet another prince’s wedding at the Palace of Culture. That made wonder if there are ever any cultural events held at this place. The answer is yes, but very rarely. Most of the time, it is simply used as a wedding hall for the elites.

Unlike the current the situation where the DQ feels blocked from the rest of the city by multiple security checkpoints guarded by squads of heavily armed and grumpy security forces, the original vision for the area was that it would be a “normal neighborhood.” Mohamed Alshaikh, president of ArRiyadh Development Authority (ADA), who has spearheaded the project when in the late 1970’s, told the magazine:

“Physically, functionally and socially, the quarter is by no means separate from the rest of Riyadh,” he says. In fact, “diplomatic mission personnel will number less than 10,000” of the DQ’s projected 22,000 inhabitants, and the quarter will be “a normal neighborhood of Riyadh, with priority to the diplomats.”

For current residents of Riyadh, the DQ is anything but a normal neighborhood. Alshaikh went on to say that they did not want a “ghetto feeling develop” in the quarter. Planners wanted it to serve as a model for future urban development in Riyadh. That obviously did not happen. More than twenty years later, some would say that the rest of the city feels like a ghetto compared to the much nicer Diplomatic Quarter.

What went wrong? Nothing in the Diplomatic Quarter itself, but almost everything around it.

3 thoughts on “On Riyadh’s Diplomatic Quarter”

DQ is still an “oasis” for us westerners and “modern” saudis alike. Parties at embassies and different cultural events there make our stay in Riyadh easier and happier…just before the empty cultural and leisure life all across the city. I still remember the good times I had at the French, Italian, American and Spanish embassies.

Interestingly enough, nearly 30 years later Saudi Arabia can still build fenced “isolates” of modern life, heavily guard them, and claim them to be a “model for future urban development”… in cosmology terms; either the future is traveling away from SA, or SA unlike all other objects in this Universe is frozen in TimeSpace!

I did hear of a tragic event in DQ,
A Bangladeshi man and fillipina wanted to marry in Saudi, they both took a taxi to DQ to get their paperworks from their embassy.
And they were arrested by the security for khulwa in Taxi, while the girl was deported the guy was sent to prison followed by deportation.

Also shouldn’t the expats have unhindered access to their embassies? What if some abused maid wants to seek refuge in her respective embassy, will the security allow her to go or detain her for running away?